Jun

11

SDC Interview With David Vyorst Creator Of The First Basket

Posted by Jeff Sack under SDC Interview 

first-basket-poster-611a

The First Basket: A Jewish Basketball Documentary is now available on DVD just in time for Father’s Day. The DVD is available through the films website The First Basket.com. Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with the movie’s Executive Producer and Creator David Vyorst. We talked about what was his motivation to make the film and what he learned from the experience:

Slam Dunk Central: David, your film is about an era from the 1920’s through early 1950’s that was in many ways the birth of the modern NBA. Why were you drawn to this subject?

David Vyorst: Firstly, it was the time when my parents grew up, and when our culture really developed, and (As David has told the story in the past) “I was rediscovering my Jewish roots and my love of basketball at the same time and the two had become powerful motifs in my life Then I heard a radio interview with the 1946 Knicks and some of the original NBA players, all of whom were Jewish, and I just knew there was an important story to be told.”

SDC: A lot of the subjects in your film are first generation Americans from Eastern European descent. As these men mention, their parents were not in favor of their participation in sports. One former player states that the “Ideal Jewish Male” was a scholar not an athlete. These boys had to sneak out of the house to play. Was this minor rebellion, part of the “American Experience?” Their assimilation into the society of the USA?

DV: I don’t think it’s so much a rebellion as almost an archetype for immigrant cultural assimilation. Take the story in the film “Bend it Like Beckham”. The themes of immigrant culture and sports as popular culture play out between generations almost identically..

SDC: David, the two dominating sports during this time period in the USA were boxing and baseball. In Irish, Italian, and other ethnic neighborhoods the kids mostly played stick ball. What was it about basketball that attracted young Jewish men?

DV: This is a great question that I try to answer very subtly in the film. Firstly, Irish, Italian, and other immigrant groups played basketball as well, and Jewish kids certainly played stickball. However there is a uniqueness to the Jewish basketball historical experience. I think there is something deep about the connection.

This deeper concept that I would like to make overt has something to do with the connections between the Jewish soul and basketball. Is there something in the DNA of each that makes them copacetic? My lead historian, Jeffrey Gurock, says that the analogue for basketball is the urban factory, because it is a team game where the players produce together, comparable to a garment shop. Thus, Jews of the early 20th felt a connection to their lives in the sport. While this may be true, the connection that I’m looking for runs deeper. There is a Talmudic maxim that posits that all Jews are responsible for one another. A sense of “team” has been hammered into the Jewish consciousness through centuries of persecution and exclusion.

The “city game” developed by Nat Holman at City College and epitomized by Red Holzman’s New York Knicks in the late 1960s and early 1970s is, perhaps, the pinnacle of the type of basketball that is the essence of the team game. This is, in some metaphysical way, related to the intrinsic Jewish sense of community. Both of those teams were celebrated champions. One of the main roots of this style of basketball is the leagues formed in the Jewish settlement houses of the early twentieth century. Conversely, when superstars play too individualistically, the entire game suffers. In this light, the 2004 Olympic team had lost sight of its Jewish basketball values, and the results were demonstrable. In the 2008 Olympics, those values were clearly redeemed.

So, as many Jewish sports fans take particular pride in the contributions of Jewish basketball pioneers, the story is bigger and deeper than that.. This is about how a global American cultural institution was forged by the aspirations of immigrant kids. It is the story of how a game played by those kids with ash cans on tenement steps is now played all around the world. This is, in fact, the story of the American 20th Century

SDC: Your film is truly a study on the evolution of what went from a neighborhood game, to a barn-storming league to the genesis of the modern game. You must have uncovered some incredible discoveries in your research. Can you pick out something that may have surprised you the most?

DV: My grandmother’s and grandfather’s signature on the entry manifest at Ellis Island..

SDC: David, former MLB stars never seem to lose their lustre. Jewish-American stars such as Hank Greenberg during my father’s childhood, and Sandy Koufax and Mike Epstein from when I grew up are still well known in 2008. However, guys like Ossie Schectman, Stan Stutz, and Sonny Hertzberg, are not what you would call “household names” today. Is that just because of the dominance of Baseball during that era, when the BAA, and then the NBA were almost second tier leagues?

DV: A few reasons. Baseball was bigger. Basketball was not as centralized as baseball. Before the NBA there were many regional competing leagues. The sport was more of a local phenomenon. Leagues were made of barnstorming teams. Basketball didn’t start to take on the status of a major national sport until the late 1950s and early 1960s.

SDC:  Even though Greenberg and Koufax were Baseball Hall of Fame players, they also played basketball as kids. Could you talk about their days on the hardwood?

DV: Koufax played basketball at the Bensonhurst JCC and his idol growing up was Max Zaslofsky. Greenberg I believe had his own basketball team, but I don’t know that much about it.

SDC: When former NBA coach Hubie Brown was on the bench he used to talk about a strategy called “Jew Ball.” What is “Jew Ball?”

DV: This relates to the connection between basketball and the Jewish soul that I tried to explain in Motion Pictures, and is a running motif in the film. The game or style of play that started out in Lower East side settlement houses stressed team play, always passing, hitting the open man and everyone playing defense.

For more information and to order your copy of the DVD head on over to The First Basket.com.

© Copyright 2009 thesackattack.net


Updates, Fresh From the Oven, Straight to Your Inbox

Comments

Leave a Reply